Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy, developing his argument that art can help lead humanity beyond the nihilistic ontotheology of the modern age. Providing pathbreaking readings of Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and his notoriously difficult Contributions to Philosophy, this book explains precisely what postmodernity meant for Heidegger, the greatest philosophical critic of modernity, and what it could still mean for us today. Exploring these issues, Iain D. Thomson examines several (...) postmodern works of art, including music, literature, painting and even comic books, from a post-Heideggerian perspective. Clearly written and accessible, this book will help readers gain a deeper understanding of Heidegger and his relation to postmodern theory, popular culture and art. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that children can infer causal relations from patterns of events. However, what appear to be cases of causal inference may simply reduce to children recognizing relevant associations among events, and responding based on those associations. To examine this claim, in Experiments 1 and 2, children were introduced to a “blicket detector,” a machine that lit up and played music when certain objects were placed upon it. Children observed patterns of contingency between objects and the machine's activation that (...) required them to use indirect evidence to make causal inferences. Critically, associative models either made no predictions, or made incorrect predictions about these inferences. In general, children were able to make these inferences, but some developmental differences between 3- and 4-year-olds were found. We suggest that children's causal inferences are not based on recognizing associations, but rather that children develop a mechanism for Bayesian structure learning. Experiment 3 explicitly tests a prediction of this account. Children were asked to make an inference about ambiguous data based on the base rate of certain events occurring. Four-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds were able to make this inference. (shrink)

In locating friendly fire in contemporary philosophy of religion, D.Z. Phillips shows that more harm can be done to religion by its philosophical defenders than by its philosophical despisers. Friendly fire is the result of an uncritical acceptance of empiricism, and Phillips argues that we need to examine critically the claims that individual consciousness is the necessary starting point from which we have to argue: for the existence of an external world and the reality of God; that God is a (...) person without a body, a pure consciousness; and that to assent to a religious belief is essentially to assign a truth value to a proposition independent of any confessional context. When these products of friendly fire are avoided, we arrive at a new understanding of belief, trust and the soul, and refuse to say more or less than we know about the realities of human life in the service of religious apologetics. (shrink)

Giuseppina D'Oro explores Collingwood's work in epistemology and metaphysics, uncovering his importance beyond his better known work in philosophy of history and aesthetics. This major contribution to our understanding of one of the most important figures in history of philosophy will be essential reading for scholars of Collingwood and all students of metaphysics and the history of philosophy.

D. N. MacCormick; XI*—The Obligation of Reparation, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 175–194, https://doi.org/10.

D.W. Hamlyn presents a history of the great philosophical thinkers and their responses to the profound problems involved in trying to understand the world and our place in it.

In this paper we will offer a few examples to illustrate the orientation of contemporary research in data analysis and we will investigate the corresponding role of mathematics. We argue that the modus operandi of data analysis is implicitly based on the belief that if we have collected enough and sufficiently diverse data, we will be able to answer most relevant questions concerning the phenomenon itself. This is a methodological paradigm strongly related, but not limited to, biology, and we label (...) it the microarray paradigm. In this new framework, mathematics provides powerful techniques and general ideas which generate new computational tools. But it is missing any explicit isomorphism between a mathematical structure and the phenomenon under consideration. This methodology used in data analysis suggests the possibility of forecasting and analyzing without a structured and general understanding. This is the perspective we propose to call agnostic science, and we argue that, rather than diminishing or flattening the role of mathematics in science, the lack of isomorphisms with phenomena liberates mathematics, paradoxically making more likely the practical use of some of its most sophisticated ideas. (shrink)

Pour un arbitrage entre la théorie cognitive de l’esprit et la phénoménologie de l’intersubjectivité la technologie simule une situation de croisement perceptif dans un espace virtuel, où la reconnaissance par un agent de la présence d’un autre repose uniquement sur l’interaction comportementale. À la justification de Merleau-Ponty et Varela quant au caractère non représentationnel ni inférentiel de la reconnaissance d’autrui, en dissociant celle-ci d’avec une détermination spatiale, on ajoutera un analogon technologique de l’expérience du « visage » comme halo de (...) présence non objectivable, d’après Levinas. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of belief and belief ascription which retains the core of the received Propositionalist theory but which, unlike the Propositionalist theory, is compatible with both Direct Reference and Individualism about belief. The focus is on developing an alternative analysis of belief ascriptions, drawing out its implications, and applying it to some standard problems. On that analysis, ascriptions involving directly referential embedded terms are seen as roughly characterizing, but not specifying, the contents of beliefs. This feature is (...) what makes it possible to maintain both Direct Reference and Individualism. (shrink)

The work of Michèle Le Dœuff creatively disrupts established notions of what philosophy might be. Far from being a discipline about the leader and the disciple, a hierarchy of knowledge and paternalism, Le Dœuff proposes a philosophy of dialogue and friendship. The conversations in this book explore how this philosophy can be enacted and explored, and show how openness and generosity can be the starting point of truly rigorous thinking. Introduced and curated by the late philosopher, Pamela Sue Anderson, In (...) Dialogue with Michèle Le Dœuff explores themes like contemporary feminism, joy in philosophy, memory, the significance of friendship to thinking and a key Le Dœuffian concept, the imaginary. Le Dœuff's interlocutors, including Penelope Deutscher, Elizabeth Fallaize and Meenda Dhanda, are some of the most significant thinkers in the fields of feminism and continental thought and provide insights and ways into considering philosophy as a profoundly dialogical exercise. (shrink)

D.O. Thomas; VI*—The Duty to Trust, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 79, Issue 1, 1 June 1979, Pages 89–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian.

This paper discusses two features of the "morally responsible self." The first has to do with the preconditions of personal identity assumed to inhere in a morally responsible self. The paper argues that it is not a requirement of moral responsibility that the self held responsible for some action is one and the same individual as the self that performed it. the second feature involves what's known as the "deep self" theory of responsibility. The paper discusses the history of the (...) theory, as well as some critical contemporary exchanges about it. (shrink)

Causal theories of content, a popular family of approaches to defining the content of mental states, commonly run afoul of two related and serious problems that prevent them from providing an adequate theory of mental content—the misrepresentation problem and the disjunction problem. In this paper, I present a causal theory of content, built on information theoretic tools, that solves these problems and provides a viable model of mental content. This is the greatest surprise reduction theory of content, which identifies the (...) content of a signal as the event the surprisal of which is most reduced by that signal. Conceptually, this amounts to the claim that the content of a signal is the event the probability of which has increased by the largest proportion, or the event that the signal makes the most less surprising to us. I develop the greatest surprise reduction theory of content in four stages. First, I introduce the general project of causal theories of content, and the challenges presented to this project by the misrepresentation and disjunction problems. Next, I review two recent and prominent causal theories of content and demonstrate the serious challenges faced by these approaches, both clarifying the need for a solution to the misrepresentation and disjunction problems and providing a conceptual background for the greatest surprise reduction theory. Then, I develop the greatest surprise reduction theory of content, demonstrate its ability to resolve the misrepresentation and disjunction problems, and explore some additional applications it may have. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of a particularly difficult challenge that remains to be addressed—the partition problem—and sketch a path to a potential solution. (shrink)

D W Hamlyn; Need Philosophy of Education be so Dreary?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 159–165, https://doi.org/10.1.

We prove frame determination results for the family of many-valued modal logics introduced by M. Fitting in the early '90s. Each modal language of this family is based on a Heyting algebra, which serves as the space of truth values, and is interpreted on an interesting version of possible-worlds semantics: the modal frames are directed graphs whose edges are labelled with an element of the underlying Heyting algebra. We introduce interesting generalized forms of the classical axioms D, T, B, 4, (...) and 5 and prove that they are canonical for certain algebraic frame properties, which generalize seriality, reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity and euclideanness. Our results are quite general as they hold for any modal language built on a complete Heyting algebra. (shrink)

Aristotle and the Rediscovery of Citizenship confronts a question that is central to Aristotle's political philosophy as well as to contemporary political theory: what is a citizen? Answers prove to be elusive, in part because late twentieth-century critiques of the Enlightenment called into doubt fundamental tenets that once guided us. Engaging the two major works of Aristotle's political philosophy, his Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics, Susan D. Collins poses questions that current discussions of liberal citizenship do not adequately address. Drawing (...) a path from contemporary disputes to Aristotle, she examines in detail his complex presentations of moral virtue, civic education, and law; his view of the aims and limits of the political community; and his treatment of the connection between citizenship and the human good. Collins thereby shows how Aristotle continues to be an indispensable source of enlightenment, as he has been for political and religious traditions of the past. (shrink)

D. Z. Phillips; III—Does it Pay to be Good?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 65, Issue 1, 1 June 1965, Pages 45–60, https://doi.org/10.1093/aris.

D. W. Hamlyn; I*—The Presidential Address: Focal Meaning, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 1–18, https://doi.org/.

Manifold expressions of a particular critique appear throughout Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus: for Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms faith is categorically not a first immediacy, and it is certainly not the first immediate, the annulment of which concludes the first movement of Hegelian philosophy. Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms make it clear that he holds the Hegelian dogmaticians responsible for the promulgation of this misconception, but when Kierkegaard’s journals and papers are consulted another transgressor emerges: the renowned anti-idealist F.D.E. Schleiermacher. I address the extent (...) to which this particular indictment is justified; over-against Gerhard Schreiber, I argue that this characterization of Schleiermacher’s view of religion is indeed a de facto critique. I begin by presenting and demonstrating the ubiquity of the phenomenon at the heart of Schleiermacher’s conception of perfect God-consciousness, then proceed to apply criticisms raised by Kierkegaardian pseudonyms Judge William, Vigilius Haufniensis, Johannes Climacus, and Anti-Climacus, supplemented with concerns raised by Kierkegaard himself, in order to demonstrate that these criticisms do indeed apply to and problematize Schleiermacher’s view. (shrink)

La doctrine du ‘contrat social’ a fait récemment une réapparition dans l'ouvrage A Theory of Justice de John Rawls. D'un avis unanime, chacun reconnaît l'importance de ce livre. Et cependant son contenu est objet de critiques divergentes. Le présent article est conçu comme une modeste contribution aux débats en cours. Après une rapide esquisse des idées maîtresses de Rawls, l'auteur dresse un bilan synoptique des conceptions du contrat social de Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau et Kant. Sont mis en évidence : 1° (...) le fait que ces quatre philosophes parlent d'un droit naturel immuable 2° le fait que, tout en étant révolutionnaires sur le plan des idées politiques, ils ne sont pas parvenus à déceler les problèmes sociaux. Rawls a intégré l'inspiration socialiste -la préoccupation de la justice sociale -dans la théorie du contrat social. Il insiste sur le dialogue impartial, base de la recherche des principes de justice politique et sociale. Son ouvrage souffre néanmoins d'une profonde incohérence. Rawls s'est tourné vers la tradition du contrat social pour sortir de l'utilitarisme, sa pensée est en effet dirigée par une inspiration toute différente. Pourtant, dans sa déduction des principes de justice, il retombe dans l'utilitarisme qu'il voulait éviter. L'ambiguïté qui en résulte le place dans l'impossibilité de répondre valablement à une critique venue de divers côtés. (shrink)